Sometimes the slope really is slippery

Miriam's Ideas points out that George Orwell warned gun registration in Britain would eventually lead to confiscation and citizen disarmament.

George Orwell was right

Rachel Maddow endorses the Hollywood blacklist

I admit, i wasn't paying a lot of attention to cable "news" when Juan Williams got borked at NPR. I caught this gem from MSNBC when Williams did an interview last month with CSPAN.


First i just love the arrogance of the handoff between Big Keith and his dashing protege.

KEITH OLBERMANN, “COUNTDOWN” HOST: And now to explain the NPR firing Juan Williams and how that is anything but a First Amendment issue, the 4,932nd time this has come up in the last two years—ladies and gentlemen, here is Rachel Maddow.
Good evening, Rachel.
RACHEL MADDOW, HOST: I intend to just keep repeating it and eventually it will stick.
OLBERMANN: We have to stamp it on people‘s foreheads backward so they can read it in the mirror.

Apparently only stupid people had a problem with NPR's actions. The whole controversy was nothing more than a misunderstanding of the first amendment. Lucky for us, Rachel Maddow will keep setting us straight no matter how long it takes.

MADDOW: The short-hand headline for what happened with Mr. Williams today is Juan Williams fired from his job because of those comments about Muslims.


To be more precise about it, to be more accurate, it should be noted that Juan Williams had two jobs and he lost one of them. He lost his job on National Public Radio, which said his comments were, quote, “inconsistent with our editorial standards and practices.”


So, Juan Williams is no longer working for National Public Radio. That‘s true. But he most certainly did not lose his job at FOX News. In fact, today, Juan Williams was given a raise at FOX News as a result of this whole thing. Quote, “FOX News handed Williams a new three-year contract Thursday morning, in a deal that amounts to nearly $2 million, a considerable bump up from his previous salary.”


Well, nearly $2 million. Mazel tov.


FOX News chief executive, Roger Ailes, said of Mr. Williams, quote, “He‘s an honest man whose freedom of speech is protected by FOX News on a daily basis.”


If you mean freedom of speech in a legal sense, constitutional sense, let‘s be clear here. This is not a First Amendment issue. Juan Williams has the right, every American citizen, has the right constitutionally to say anything that he wants. All of us do. That‘s what the First Amendment does.


The First Amendment does not guarantee you a paid job as a commentator to say what you want. Your employment as a person paid to speak is at the pleasure of your employer. In this case, it displeased Juan Williams‘ employer, at least one of them, for him to have reassured the FOX News audience he too is afraid of Muslims on airplanes and that‘s not a bigoted thing. That comment did not fly with one of the people who was paying one of the organizations that was paying Mr. Williams to say what he thinks. And so, Juan Williams lost that job.


This is not a First Amendment issue. This is an issue of what your employer is OK with.

"This is an issue of what your employer is OK with."

For sixty years the left has wailed about the horrible injustice of the Hollywood blacklist. Now, thanks to Maddow, we can see that there really was nothing to worry about.




"This is an issue of what your employer is OK with."


That really cuts to the heart of the matter with the Hollywood 10. The studios and their customers decided that they were NOT "OK with" employees who were slavish followers of bloody Joe Stalin. No big deal according to the standard set down by Rachel Maddow.


Or so one might think. As this post points out, Maddow has a somewhat schizoid take on the blacklist seasoned with a shaky grasp of the historical facts.


Maddow does exhibit some serious chops when it comes to side-stepping hard questions while pretending to answer them. She reduces the whole question to a narrow legalistic point. The questions about NPR's liberal bias and lack of ideological diversity get shunted aside. The broader issue of free discussion versus "thought crimes" is never addressed. And then she just marches right into a nice piece of Fox bashing.


The sad thing is, she is supposed to be the reasonable, smart lefty at MSNBC.

NOW defends Michelle Bachman

Little Miss Atilla is not really impressed.

Here Comes NOW . . .

Guess merging with Arianna's plantation wasn't a magic bullet after all

AOL reports disappointing ad growth

AOL Inc reported a surprise second-quarter loss on Tuesday, citing weaker-than-expected advertising growth that sent shares of the company plummeting as much as 31 percent on Tuesday.

Another chapter of history now needs a re-write

Leftist Terrorist Turned Neo-Nazi Says Was Stasi Informant Too

Horst Mahler, a former far-left lawyer now doing time in prison for Holocaust denial, has admitted to another strange twist in his head-spinning political career: He worked as an informant for East Germany's secret police -- the Stasi -- from 1967 to 1970.


Mahler has made a point of outraging the German public since the '60s. A former lawyer for the radical-left Red Army Faction (the "Baader-Meinhof gang"), he now belongs to the NPD, Germany's largest far-right party. On Sunday evidence emerged that he was an "inoffizieller Mitarbeiter" (IM), or unofficial collaborator, for the Stasi during three crucial years of his left-wing agitation. He's reportedly admitted to state investigators that the reports are true.

Near the end of the Cold War, conservatives claimed that the Soviet Bloc was sponsering terrorism. All the right-thinking people pooh-poohed the idea.


Now, after the fall of Stalin's empire, the evidence of Soviet support (if not direction) grows and grows.


Turns out the smart guys were wrong.


A lot of people owe Claire Sterling an apology.

Like a drunk stumbling through a maze in the dark

Sometimes I despair when I listen to what passes for political debate read what passes for political journalism. We are mired in the worst economy since the Great Depression, yet neither party has the vision or courage to address the grave problems that we face. Instead, they cling to their talking points and tired nostrums.

Tax the rich!
Reagan! Tax cuts!

This piece in the New Yorker suggests that the problems we face are deep-seated and novel (at least for this generation).

Mastering the Machine
How Ray Dalio built the world’s richest and strangest hedge fund

Dalio was one of those who saw disaster earlier than most:

Searching for historical precedents, Bridgewater put together detailed histories of previous credit crises, going back to Weimar Germany. The firm’s researchers also went through the public accounts of nearly all the major financial institutions in the world and constructed estimates of how much money they stood to lose from bad debts. The figure they came up with was eight hundred and thirty-nine billion dollars. Armed with this information, Dalio visited the Treasury Department in December, 2007, and met with some of Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson’s staff. Nobody took much notice of what he said, but he went on to the White House, where he presented his numbers to some senior economic staffers. “Ray laid out the argument that the losses he foresaw in the banking system were astronomical,” a former Bush Administration official who attended the White House meeting recalled. “Everybody else was talking about liquidity. Ray was talking about solvency.”


His warnings ignored in Washington, Dalio issued more jeremiads to his clients. “If the economy goes down, it will not be a typical recession,” his newsletter said in January, 2008. Rather, it would be a disaster in which “the financial deleveraging causes a financial crisis that causes an economic crisis. . . . This continues until there is a reflation, a currency devaluation and government guarantees of the efficacy of key financial intermediaries.” As the crisis deepened, Dalio continued to assess it far more accurately than many senior policymakers did. When the government allowed Lehman Brothers to collapse, he despaired. “So, now we sit and wait to see if they have some hidden trick up their sleeves, or if they really are as reckless as they seem,” the newsletter said on September 15, 2008.

What's worrisome is that he is convinced that the current problems are not going away any time soon:

This spring, he told me that economic growth in the United States and Europe was set to slow again. This was partly because some emergency policy measures, such as the Obama Administration’s stimulus package, would soon come to an end; partly because of the chronic indebtedness that continues to weigh on these regions; and partly because China and other developing countries would be forced to take drastic policy actions to bring down inflation. Now that the slowdown appears to have arrived, Dalio thinks it will be prolonged. “We are still in a deleveraging period,” he said. “We will be in a deleveraging period for ten years or more.”


Dalio believes that some heavily indebted countries, including the United States, will eventually opt for printing money as a way to deal with their debts, which will lead to a collapse in their currency and in their bond markets. “There hasn’t been a case in history where they haven’t eventually printed money and devalued their currency,” he said. Other developed countries, particularly those tied to the euro and thus to the European Central Bank, don’t have the option of printing money and are destined to undergo “classic depressions,” Dalio said.

If leverage got us into this mess, then it makes sense explore ways in which we can avoid such problems in the future. Simon Johns suggests reforming the tax code which now favors debt over equity.

Could Tax Reform Make the Financial System Safer?

Loose lips sink ships

In From the Cold raises a delicate but important question.

Too Much Chatter


But did recent disclosures about the bin Laden raid give the Taliban an edge in downing that Chinook? So far, a definitive link hasn't been established. Indeed, our enemies in Afghanistan have been observing our special forces for almost a decade, and they've clearly learned a great deal about our tactics and techniques. We also know that Taliban gunners routinely attempt to engage our helicopters with RPGs, their preferred weapon-of-choice. Unfortunately, the enemy gets lucky once in a while, with deadly consequences for our troops.




Still, we can't completely dismiss the notion that the recent focus on special ops missions has at least affirmed our operational tendencies for enemy planners. For example, The New Yorker piece explains the use of quick reaction forces (QRFs) to supplement the primary team, providing additional airlift and fire support as necessary. When one of the HH-60s crashed while attempting to insert SEALs inside bin Laden's compound on 1 May, a Chinook from the QRF was quickly dispatched to pick up the operators and the chopper crew, once the raid was complete.

There is plenty of evidence that our enemies use open source intelligence when they plan operations. (See two examples here and here.) The attack on FOB Chapman in December 2009 demonstrated that even al Qaeda gangs in remote Waziristan have fairly sophisticated intelligence and counterintelligence capabilities.


The never-ending victory lap for taking out bin Laden has put much once secret information into the public record. This puts our forces at risk.


It is time for it to stop.

Heads on pikes

This leaker deserves a public horsewhipping.

The Harm of Leaking KIA Information to the Press

One of the most despicable reactions I have seen from the US to this incident was the fact that the initial press reports quoted an unnamed government official as confirming that the KIAs were from Seal Team 6 and the 160th Avn. Bde., which is the special ops aviation unit. This unnamed person requested anonymity because the families of the KIAs had not yet been notified.

I told you Rupert Murdoch wants the murderers to win

The End of America's Most Wanted: Good News for Criminals, Bad News for the FBI

The fugitives of the U.S. may be heaving a sigh of relief at the news that the television show America's Most Wanted is no more. After 23 years of profiling the dregs of the criminal underworld — directly leading to 1,154 arrests by law-enforcement agencies — the show was canceled in May by Fox, and its final episode aired last month. The close working relationships that host John Walsh cultivated with the FBI and the U.S. Marshals Service over the years was an unprecedented collaboration between law enforcement and television. It was one of the very first reality shows that resulted in great TV and did a lot of good. Its cancellation leaves a hole both of those agencies will now need to fill.


"This is a big hit for us. The show is invaluable," says Geoff Shank, assistant director of investigative operations for the U.S. Marshals Service. "We have arrested so many heinous people and we've saved so many lives because of America's Most Wanted." Kevin Perkins, assistant director of the FBI's criminal-investigations division, echoes the sentiment. "I personally hate to see it go," Perkins tells TIME. "We had 17 of our most wanted fugitives captured because of them and over 550 different cases solved as a result of tips."

It is worth noting that AMW had ratings that dwarfed the freak shows hosted by Jane Velez-Mitchell and Nancy Grace on HLN. This puts the lie to the idea that networks put on trashy tabloid shoutfests because "that's what the viewers want." Nancy Grace prospers while AMW is canceled because her show is CHEAP (and here) More viewers "wanted" AMW than Grace. The bean counters get the final vote, not the audience.




Related:

Cable news, vox populi, and professional sleaze

Jeff Immelt is the gift that keeps giving

Chairman of Obama’s Job Council to Create New Jobs…In China?

My vote is "Yes"

The threat of Nancy Grace

Here's a question to consider: Is Turner Broadcasting's abuse of its power as a news organization through the biased coverage of criminal trials really any less a betrayal of public trust than the Murdoch tabloid scandal now underway in Britain?

The media critic as corporate shill

Howard Kurtz Attempts to Discredit Cenk Uygur

Our generation's Long Telegram

Many historians and most pundits hate to credit Ronald Reagan with winning the Cold War. There is, in fact, a wide-spread loathing to even speak of a U.S. victory in the long, twilight struggle. Instead, the conventional wisdom runs something like this: "Ronald Reagan, an amiable dunce, happened to be president when Gorbachev decided to end the Cold War."


Historian Paul Kengor begs to differ and he has the newly declassified documents to back it up.

Predicting the Soviet Collapse

When we look back at the Cold War, we remember big names and big statements and documents. There’s nary a college course on the Cold War that excludes George Kennan’s seminal “Long Telegram,” sent from the U.S. embassy in Moscow in February 1946. Kennan’s memo prophetically captured what the free world faced from the USSR at the start of the Cold War, forecasting a long struggle ahead. Herb Meyer’s November 1983 memo likewise prophetically captured what the free world faced from the USSR, but this time nearing the end of the Cold War, uniquely forecasting a long struggle about to close — with victory.


George Kennan’s memo is remembered in our textbooks and our college lectures. Herb Meyer’s memo merits similar treatment.

Meyer worked for William Casey at CIA. He was an outsider and something of bombthrower. In addition to his memo on Cold War strategy, he and his boss had an acute sense of the weaknesses that beset the analytical branch of the Agency.

Meyer found his NIC [National Intelligence Council] colleagues unhurried, complacent, serene. '"hey had a phrase that drove me crazy," he recalled. "You'd raise a hypothesis and they'd answer, 'we have no evidence of that.' What do you mean, you have no evidence? Is there no evidence, or didn't you ask the right questions to get the evidence? Where did you look? 'We have no evidence' can mean you never looked at all, never asked....


"'We don't have any evidence' is a non-sequitur. Bill and I would go ballistic when they'd tell us that. Did they expect it to turn up in the mailbox?"

Joseph Persico, Casey

Sadly, this problem persisted even after Meyer, Casey, and Reagan were proven right about the Soviet unions problems.


Donald Rumsfeld wrote this in his recent memoirs:

I first heard a variant of the phrase 'known unknowns' in a discussion with former NASA administrator William R. Graham when we served together on the Ballistic Missile Threat Commission in the late 1990s. Members of our bipartisan commission were concerned that some briefers from the U. S. intelligence community treated the fact that they lacked information about a possible activity to infer that the activity had not happened and would not. In other words, if something could not be proven to be true, then it could be assumed not to be true.

The future of blogging

A couple of pessimistic posts

The Slow, Painful Coming Death Of The Independent, Conservative Blogosphere

The narrowing of the blogosphere

I don't disagree with the grim prognosis.


All in all, this is good news for the MSM. They may shrink in size and profitability, but they will still control the narrative. Both posts note that Twitter and Facebook have dented the growth in blog readership. Neither of these present the same challenge to the MSM as blogs. Snarky tweets about MoDo or Howard Kurtz are quick and easy but they don't change many minds. They are just background noise.


Blogs, especially the long-form blogging that Den Beste did or that Neo-neocon still does, has the potentially to break the MSM's monopoly on "explanation space". That's what KC Johnson did in the Duke lacrosse case, what Powerline did in Rathergate, and what 2d Amendment bloggers have been doing for years.

Did the Casey Anthony jury prevent a miscarriage of justice?

Software Designer Reports Error in Anthony Trial


Assertions by the prosecution that Casey Anthony conducted extensive computer searches on the word “chloroform” were based on inaccurate data, a software designer who testified at the trial said Monday.


The designer, John Bradley, said Ms. Anthony had visited what the prosecution said was a crucial Web site only once, not 84 times, as prosecutors had asserted. He came to that conclusion after redesigning his software, and immediately alerted prosecutors and the police about the mistake, he said.

If this story is true, then a key part of the case for premeditated murder was based on a faulty analysis. Furthermore, the police and prosecutors knew they were presenting misleading data to the jury in what was a death penalty case.


That's Mike Nifong territory.


As per usual, the spittle-spewing, self-appointed Furies at HLN have no interest in this possible crime that occurred right in front of their eyes. Instead, they are intent on determining the whereabouts of Casey Anthony and vilifying the jurors who dared to defy the cable lynch mob,


Related:

Atticus Finch doesn't work here

Always be suspicious when they try to blame the dead guy

Justice Department lawyers contradict FBI findings in anthrax case


Now, however, Justice Department lawyers have acknowledged in court papers that the sealed area in Ivins' lab — the so-called hot suite — didn't contain the equipment needed to turn liquid anthrax into the refined powder that floated through congressional buildings and post offices in the fall of 2001.

Baseball is fun again in Pittsburgh

Shiver Me Timbers: The Bucs Are in First Place!

Jason Whitlock tells it like it is

Like James Harrison, Whitlock understands that NFL commissioner Roger Goodell is an opportunistic fraud.

Harrison voices frustrations of many

RTWT

Nancy Grace: Unifying left and right, bloggers and the MSM

How Nancy Grace has reinvented journalism’s ‘Sob Sister’

Professional vigilante and mawkish sentimentalist, Nancy is full of something, but it’s not grace. While accusing other lawyers of avarice and opportunism, she makes her own fortune by angry denunciations of defense efforts, almost always accompanied by lachrymose attention to the plight of the victim, especially if she is white, female, pretty — and missing.

A Sordid Cast Around Casey Anthony

She doesn’t serve the cause of victims with such histrionics. She serves the cause of Nancy Grace. And she succeeds only in trivializing everything — and getting ratings. A record 5.2 million viewers turned to HLN on the judgment day. Apparently many of us share her appetite for gross caricatures of good and evil, and come out of this as graceless as she.

What hath Murdoch wrought (for the Right)?

Mark Riebling suggests that what was good for News Corp. has been mostly bad for American conservatism.

The Case for Right-Wing Tennis Elbow

Looks like Laura Ingraham is a metrocon

Why does a man even need a purse? A man should carry around exactly two items: a wallet and a phone. If you routinely tote anything more than that, you just might be a woman.

She forgot the flashlight and pocketknife.

Nancy Grace hates America and the Founding Fathers

How Democracy Crumbles: Implosion of the Jury System

First, in our system of criminal justice, the State must prove its case. This is such a fundamental concept for the American system that it is almost embarrassing to mention. Nonetheless, it seems that many people in the media and protesters outside of the courthouse have forgotten that all-important concept. But this idea that the State must prove the guilt of the accused, and prove it beyond a “reasonable doubt” to a jury of peers is the key stone that protects us from arbitrary oppression by the State. The Founding Fathers considered this an essential bulwark of liberty. So when the jurors in the Casey Anthony case explain that they could not convict Ms. Anthony because the State had not proven the allegations, that is an extremely serious charge and one that indicates that the system is working.

Not to be missed

The dangerous spread of the Nancy Grace virus

Until you look into the shifty eyes of Nancy Grace, until you hear the poisonous accusations rolling smoothly off her tongue, you cannot understand what cable TV has done to American criminal justice. On 24-hour U.S. television “news,” the law has become a morality play narrated by media stars who believe they know what viewers should think.

In other Nancynews, Bill O'Reilly decided to defend the belle of the freakers ball on his show last night. He even had her on to spew her usual mixture of toxic bile and maudlin self-justification.


Seemed strange that Fox News would ride to the rescue of a competitor. Are they trying to recruit her? Or is it just a reflexive anti-MSM reaction: if Time magazine is against it, then FNC is for it?


My theory, Bill O'R doesn't see Nancy as a competitor and he relates to her as another pseudo-populist bully.

Quote of the day

"Anybody who thinks he'll attend a trial in order to learn the facts of the case is a graven fool. It is a chess game, I tell you. Each side presents only the facts and opinions that serve their case, and they slant their facts to strengthen their position."

Casey Anthony: Strange priorities of cable news

UPDATED

Cable news, especially Nancy Grace and her flying monkeys at HLN, keeps beating the dead horse that is the Casey Anthony case. The jury is now in their crosshairs for the unforgivable act of rendering a verdict that was out of step with the wishes of the cable mob.


Some good posts that go against the grain:

Justice was done: Casey Anthony is not the new O.J. Simpson

Casey Anthony and the Law And Order Effect

The Casey Anthony verdict: the jury was right and Nasty Nancy (as always) is wrong

HLN's obsession with the verdict reveals what passes for justice in Nancy Grace's world. It is a perverted thing, twisted by a manipulative demagogue who is both dishonest and cowardly. HLN is delighted that she draws viewers by stoking their sense of outrage. It says something about the journalistic standards at CNN that they are happy to have her on their team. (I wonder what fearless media critic Howard Kurtz will say about Grace's ravings on "Reliable Sources"?)


Poor Paddy Chayefsky. He Pulled out all the stops when he wrote "Network". Yet, even his rich imagination could not conceive of the nightly freakers ball hosted by Jane Velez-Mitchell and Nancy Grace. Did he even suspect that the executives at CNN would look at his masterpiece and see a business model instead of a prophetic warning?


It says something about the ethos of cable news that they have spent many more hours discussing this single “not guilty” verdict than they devoted to the dozens and dozens of wrongful convictions and the innocent men who spent years on death row.



UPDATE (11 July):

"Reliable Sources" did a pretty decent job on the Anthony case. They, at least, acknowledged that Nancy Grace led the charge on this media circus and that the overkill was excessive. OTOH, Kurtz did not play up Grace's most outrageous statements (e.g. "Somewhere ou there, the Devil is dancing tonight" after the verdict came in). For a show and critic that always hammered Beck for his most extreme statements, HK was much such nicer to Nancy his fellow CNNer.


Related:

Attticus Finch doesn't work here

Duke lacrosse: how important is the Gang of 88?

Immigration

Victor Davis Hanson packs a lot of good sense and clear thinking into this piece:

The Philosophies of Illegal Immigration

David Zurawik really, really hates Glenn Beck

His column on Beck's exit from Fox news is heavy on emotion, light on facts, devoid of logic, and saturated with hypocrisy and an Orwellian urge to rewrite history.

Glenn Beck, Fox end dark, nasty cable era today
Controversial host leaves a legacy of reckless, divisive speech behind


One of the things that sets professional journalists apart from the unwashed masses is their appreciation of nuance and their rejection of of simplistic black and white thinking.

I am glad to see Beck leaving Fox News today, and I do not have one good thing to say about him -- or Fox for giving him this pulpit.

Whoa.


OK, maybe Zurawik is right that. Maybe Beck is way out there with Hitler, Stalin, and serial killers. Unadulterated evil with no redeeming characteristics. But i doubt it. Even if i knew nothing of Beck I'd still question Zurawik's conclusions because the case he presents is so laughably weak.


Our outraged critic leads off by blaming Beck for our climate of incivility even when Beck is the victim of boorish, intolerant behavior:

I wonder why he found it surprising that he and his family were not embraced by a crowd at Bryant Park when they attended an outdoor film showing there recently...


Of course, it is unfortunate if what he says happened did happen. But given his reckless on-air attacks on the president of the United States and others, I do not think he should be surprised by any hostility he encounters in his off-air life.

Our betters in the MSM love to lecture us about the necessity to tolerate unpopular speech. But Zurawik's comments makes one wonder about their sincerity. Apparently, some unpopular speech deserves to be met with open hostility; We show our tolerance by acting intolerant. Black is white, up is down.


That's nuance.


Our intrepid critic-- a made member of the MSM-- does not know what happened in Bryant Park. But he has his doubts.

what we mainly have is Beck's tearful on-air account during Tuesday's show of what happened to him and his family. And Beck is not exactly my idea of a reliable narrator.

An honest man might do a little digging before he accuses someone of lying. We naive amateurs assume that journalists are paid to 'get to the bottom of the story.' (Actually most of us no longer assume that, but the MSM keeps telling us that's what they do.)


It's not too hard to find evidence that supports Beck's account. It must be fairly easy because even bloggers could do it.


What we see here is the political utility of journalistic agnosticism. As long as Zurawik does not know what happened to Beck and his family then he can slyly suggest that Beck is lying.

The rest of his bill of particulars is equally dishonest. For instance, he trots out Van Jones as a victim of the insidious Beck.

He called one of Obama's senior aides, Van Jones, a communist, and he went after him day after day after day for one stretch on his show, using rhetoric straight out of the ugly McCarthy era of the 1950s.

Which just goes to prove that Barbara Olson was exactly right:

In our political culture, the incantation of "McCarthyism" serves as a kind of permanent restraining order on legitimate inquiries about the political past of people on the Left.

Before Beck called Van Jones a communist, Van Jones called himself a communist.

Jones had planned to move to Washington, DC, and had already landed a job and an apartment there. But in jail, he said, "I met all these young radical people of color -- I mean really radical, communists and anarchists. And it was, like, 'This is what I need to be a part of.'" Although he already had a plane ticket, he decided to stay in San Francisco. "I spent the next ten years of my life working with a lot of those people I met in jail, trying to be a revolutionary." In the months that followed, he let go of any lingering thoughts that he might fit in with the status quo. "I was a rowdy nationalist on April 28th, and then the verdicts came down on April 29th," he said. "By August, I was a communist."

If McCarthyism is bad because the Tailgunner accused innocent people of being communists, then it is absurd to invoke his name when it come to the Beck-Van Jones story.


Or is now an act of lese-majeste to tell the truth about Obama's czars?


In Z-world, calling Van Jones a communist was an act of unparallelled depravity. It is much worse calling the president a fascist war criminal.


Zurawik claims that Beck's reporting was "as nasty and dirty" as anything that took place during the 1950s blacklist. Yet, at the heart of the blacklist was the attempt to silence unpopular reporters and entertainers by pressuring their sponsors. Beck did not do that; the allies and associates of Van Jone tried to do that to Beck. In his sputtering, unthinking rage our esteemed critic hopes we won't remember that.


I've never been a big fan of Beck. I think even conservatives can find plenty to criticize about his show. Thoughtful criticism is essential to reasoned discourse. Zurawik wants us to believe that he is a defender of such discourse and that his attack on Beck was a necessary part of that defense. In the end, though, his column can best be described by the epithets he hurled at Beck: "ugly," "paranoid," "angry", "reckless", "hateful", "off-the-wall".


Maybe Pogo was right-- Zurawik has met the enemy and he is him.

MSNBC, Mark Halperin, and the question of hypocrisy

Unprecedented

Flashback: MSNBC Hosts Called Bush a Murderous Fascist, Never Faced Suspensions

The real message our war on Libya sent to rogue states

Over at Verum Serum:

Gaddafi’s Son: Lesson of Libya is Don’t Disarm or Trust the West

The message of Iraq was, you can only mess with the US so much. The same with Afghanistan. But Libya made moves in our direction just a few years ago. Now we’re trying to kill the leader who made those moves. So why would we expect dictators in Iran or Syria to do anything similar, no matter what carrots we have to offer?

Media misbehavior is always good for a laugh

Chris Hansen Accused of Cheating, Gets Exactly What's Coming to Him


Oh Dear: To Catch A Predator Host Chris Hansen, He of the Hidden Camera Sex Sting, Caught... Cheating on His Wife By Hidden Cameras

Lot's of action on the Memorandum thread

This isn't the first time Hansen has come under fire. The previous scandal did not draw much attention but it was much more serious:

Scandal at NBC

The story really was made for him

Mark Steyn on the most ridiculous story that was once taken seriously by serious people:

LibzGetReal

Last week was a great week for lesbians coming out of the closet — coming out, that is, as middle-aged heterosexual men. ...


A century ago, a British Army officer went to the Levant and reinvented himself as Lawrence of Arabia. Now a middle-aged American male college student goes to the Internet and reinvents himself as Florence of Arabia. We have become familiar in recent years with the booming literary genre of the fake memoir, to which Oprah’s late Book Club was distressingly partial.

On the futility of arguing with conspiracy theorists

Neo-neocon wonders what motivates the promoters of JFK conspiracy theories:

The Kennedy conspiracists’ conspiracy

Bugliosi makes an especially interesting point in his introduction, one I hadn’t really thought of before, which is that although most of the people who believe in the various conspiracies are probably sincere in their beliefs, many of those who actually write the conspiracy books are not. They are lying and they know it, but they count on their readers not to realize this.*

It's a question that probably deserves book-length treatment.


One of the commenters pointed to this wonderful quote from Robert Heinlein:

I could go on endlessly--but there isn't time. This won't change the mind of your friend; when a man makes up his mind without evidence, no evidence disproving his opinion will change his mind.

One point Bugliosi emphasizes is that most of those who doubt the conclusions of the Warren Commission have never read the commission's Report or any serious work by a supporter of the commission. The skeptics rely on the material written by critics of the WC. Hence, arguing with them is frustrating because they reached their 'conclusions' without ever having an open mind in the first place.


Frequently, they dismiss books without reading them. They reject the arguments and research that contradict their pet theories with a smug knowingness and simply keep repeating their talking points.


(One of that ilk shows up in Neo-neocons comments)


Neo-neocon continues the discussion in a later post:

Kennedy assassination conspirators again: how they operate


There are two topics almost guaranteed to draw a lot of heated commentary and trolls.


No, I’m not speaking of tits and ass (hey, I just threw that in to see if some traffic would come). I’m speaking of (a) anything defending Israel; and (b) anything challenging the Kennedy assassination conspiracy theorists.

*I'm not sure that i agree with Bugliosi on the honesty and honor of the average JFK Grassy Knoller. I incline toward Bill Whittle's view laid down here:

SEEING THE UNSEEN, Part 2

Related:

The Porn-Conspiracy connection

Debunking a rumor can make it seem more true?

Bill Whittle takes on conspiracy thinking

#ad

Sweet

Mavericks top Heat 105-95 for 1st NBA title

Politico speaks truth to power

Incest Desk: The Weinerless Politico Mike Allen Edition

Allen reasoned that he showed “restraint” by not covering the biggest story of the week. The sentiment is understood, but restraint is one thing, falling into a coma is another. Allen said an ex-Obama official at V.P. Biden’s BBQ that he attended yesterday could “vouch” for him and was impressed by his restraint and judgment in not covering the story. This gives Allen major gold stars on the Incest Desk because what journalist doesn’t strive to impress Obama officials — ex or otherwise?

Newt's problem in a nutshell

Americans want leaders who give the impression that they know more than they are saying, but nobody could possibly know more than Newt says.

RTWT here.

Ayn Rand

Joe Carter has two terrific posts:

The Fountainhead of Satanism

Ayn Rand, Shrugged

Related:

Who is John Galt
Apparently he was a child-killing psychopath


when Irish bankers went Galt

Nice to see the good guys win one

Little Miss Attila:

Robert L. Hymers, who tried to report me to the FBI, has been INDICTED for fraud and grand theft auto

The decline of the New York Times: From the paper of record to "the paper for court eunuchs

Ed Driscoll:

WeinerGate versus the Summer of Nixon

And this what the MSM both dreads and can’t come to grips with: much as every aging hippie wants to recapture the halcyon days of 1967 and the “Summer of Love,” the MSM wants to recapture that golden moment in 1974, when the news consisted of three commercial TV networks, PBS, AP, Reuters, and the writers’ bullpens at the New York Times and the Washington Post.

I posted this a couple of years back:

Carroll’s golden age coincides with the rise of the one newspaper town. Why was that a good thing? How could New York be better off when the Times did not have to compete with the Herald-Tribune? Why is journalism the rare business where monopolies serve the customer better than competition?


I doubt that the reading public was or is better off. The owners were because monopolies provide a nice stream of predictable earnings. The newsroom liked that the owners were fat and happy because as long as the income statement looked good the owners did not interfere with content. Editors and reporters were free to chases awards, collect bigger paychecks, and indulge their ideological obsessions. Local monopolies also gave journalists bigger megaphones and a de facto victory in “explanation space.


The golden age, in short, rested on a temporary set of conditions in which economics and technology favored news monopolies. The readers never wanted it. That much became clear when technology began to offer more choices.

There some measure of irony at the old geezers longing for the Summer of '74. Here's David Halberstam on how the Pepsi Generation drove Nixon from office while the old bulls got left in the dust:

Guthman thought [Jackl] Nelson was the best all-round reporter he had ever seen, that he could get anyone to talk. He often wondered what would have happened if Nelson had been on the story from the beginning. He might have taken hold and he rather than Woodward and Bernstein woulld have locked up the best sources, because of the smell of it....


The smell. That was crucial. Woodward and Bernstein were new and young, and no one knew their names, they had no established sources, they had no wives or children to go home to, all they had was hunger, and they were out on the street every day visiting the homes of the people from CREEP. .... [The LA Times reporters] were established and had established sources, people whom they had learned to trust over the years. ...


Years later, reading their first book, All the President's Men, Jack Nelson felt somewhat sick, he knew immediately what had happened and why he had been beaten on the story, why the two younger reporters had been better. They had picked up on the fear...


It was for the three Times reporters very frustrating, particularly for Jack Nelson, who had never been behind on a story before. no matter how hard they worked, Woodward and Bernstein always seemed to be just one step ahead....always ahead locking up the best sources

Driscoll also quotes Andrew Klavan:

Watching Breitbart crush Weiner beneath his heel like an insignificant weiner, it occurs to me that Breitbart’s genius – and he really is an information genius – consists almost entirely of two pieces of knowledge: one, leftists will lie knowing the media will back them and two, the media will back them. With those two principles, he manages to make utter fools of both lying leftists and their corrupt mainstream media cronies

That is exactly on point. When Weiner first addressed this matter with the MSM i was struck by his overweening arrogance. He actually thought that his aggressive demeanor and clever evasions would let him put the story behind him. He was wrong, but where did he ever get the idea that he could brazen it out?

Truer words were never blogged

That said, Jeff Jarvis is a bleedin' idiot

You know Rep. Weiner is in trouble

When his problems make Chicago politcs look good.

Welcome to Weinergate: It's a problem you don't see in Chicago

Why is U.S. Rep. Anthony Weiner dancing around his underwear problem?

An important new book on the financial crisis

Here's the transcript of an interview with Gretchen Morgenson.


Morgenson points out that both Barney Frank and Chris Dodd played large roles in furthering the activities that created this economic catastrophe.


Surely it must say something about Washington culture that both men were given lead roles in authoring the "financial reform" legislation after the crash.

Is Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik engaged in a cover-up?

That's the impression you have to ask after reading the latest from Bob Owens.

Seventy-One Shots: The Death of Jose Guereña

Jose Guereña survived two tours in Iraq, but he couldn't survive his own government

Wonder if there are any enterprising Woodwards out there in Arizona. Or has Dupnik earned provisional Gorelick status for his attempt to slander the Tea Party movement in the wake of the Rep. Giffords shooting?

A good read

The Colorado Kid is the first and only Stephen King book I've read. It not the sort of story I think of when I think "Stephen King". In all respects it is sui generis. Published as part of the Hard Case Crime series it lacks the tough private eye and violent actions. Instead of mean urban streets, the action (such as it is) takes place on a small resort island off the coast of Maine.


The story is not a simple whodunit. It is a rich, discursive meditation on the very nature of the mystery story and the value of journalistic narratives.


In the end, it was one of the best books I've read in years.

Michael Barone agrees

It's the Chicago Way

Obama skirts rule of law to reward pals, punish foes

Punishing enemies and rewarding friends -- politics Chicago style -- seems to be the unifying principle that helps explain the Obamacare waivers, the NLRB action against Boeing and the IRS' gift-tax assault on 501(c)(4) donors.


They look like examples of crony capitalism, bailout favoritism and gangster government.


One thing they don't look like is the rule of law.

That's good stuff right there

Ace shows the losers at SNL how it is done:

Special Guest Commentary

Smug and clueless on both sides of the Atlantic

David Brooks of the New York Times thinks he understands Great Britain. He doesn't

Good write-up on the priest abuse scandal

George Weigel looks at the recent John Jay College study:

Priests, Abuse, and the Meltdown of a Culture

As he notes, the report contradicts the established narrative on may critical points.


This part of the history usually gets ignored or glossed over:

This, in turn, led to an overdependence on psychiatry and psychology in dealing with clerical perpetrators, in the false confidence that they could be “cured” and returned to active ministry — a pattern that again mirrored broader societal trends.

The man who invented the modern thriller

The Telegraph has an interview with Frederick Forsyth:

Frederick Forsyth: 'I had expected women to hate him. But no...’

Forty years since 'The Day of the Jackal’ transformed the thriller, its author Frederick Forsyth talks to Helen Brown about the curious allure of his cold-blooded assassin.

"The most trusted name in news"-- Really?

Sam Feist and Eliot Spitzer: A tale of two CNNs

But before I had a chance to write that piece, along came word from TVNewser that CNN had run a piece on political sex scandals and a decision had been made in the editing process to not include the Spitzer saga, one of the more egregiously hypocritical examples of the very pattern the piece was trying to report.

Getting it wrong about bin Laden

All the so-called ‘experts' really were wrong about bin Laden

Most of what we were told over the last decade turns out to be wrong. Miniter has a theory about why that is true:

Reflecting back on each of these fables about bin Laden, a common thread emerges. Each of them first appeared in the Pakistani press before migrating onto America’s television screens. Can that be a coincidence?

RTWT. Lots of interesting stuff.


I think that this might be the most significant myth:

How many times have you heard how religious or pious bin Laden was? Such a carefully crafted religious reputation certainly helped al Qaeda’s recruiting efforts, but it’s unclear why so many Western experts took this claim at face value. They certainly would not have used these adjectives about any Western leader without really compelling proof. Again, evidence from bin Laden’s lair shows how wrong the experts were.


An extensive library of pornographic videos, most of it of fairly recent vintage, was recovered in the electronic files of bin Laden’s computer, according to Reuters.

It suggests that David Gelernter was on to something when he wrote this:

We now learn that suicide bombers are told to expect a heaven full of comely virgins as their next assignment. To the suicide-murderers, those waiting virgins are real as dirt. The killers call themselves "martyrs," but in their own minds they are the next thing to sex criminals. "Pardon me, sir or madam, do you know why I plan to murder your child? Because the authorities are offering me great sex--and, after all, I don't get many opportunities."


People who think this way are shielded from view, up to a point, by their own sheer evil. They are painful to contemplate. We instinctively look away, as we do whenever we are confronted with monstrous deformity. Nothing is harder or more frightening to look at than a fellow human who is bent out of shape. And moral deformity is the most frightening kind by far

Miniter has a new book out that looks like it could be a must read. C-SPAN has an hour long interview with him here.

It's the Chicago way

Nearly 20 percent of new Obamacare waivers are gourmet restaurants, nightclubs, fancy hotels in Nancy Pelosi’s district


Of the 204 new Obamacare waivers President Barack Obama’s administration approved in April, 38 are for fancy eateries, hip nightclubs and decadent hotels in House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi’s Northern California district.

Rupert Murdoch wants the criminals to win

Fox to cancel America’s Most Wanted?

David Mamet makes waves

Andrew Ferguson chronicles the political evolution of out most interesting living playwright.

Converting Mamet

Here is Feguson on a talk Mamet gave at Standford.

But the unease that began to ripple through the audience had less to do with the speaker’s delivery than with his speech’s content. Mamet was delivering a frontal assault on American higher education, the provider of the livelihood of nearly everyone in his audience.


Higher ed, he said, was an elaborate scheme to deprive young people of their freedom of thought. He compared four years of college to a lab experiment in which a rat is trained to pull a lever for a pellet of food. A student recites some bit of received and unexamined wisdom—“Thomas Jefferson: slave owner, adulterer, pull the lever”—and is rewarded with his pellet: a grade, a degree, and ultimately a lifelong membership in a tribe of people educated to see the world in the same way.


“If we identify every interaction as having a victim and an oppressor, and we get a pellet when we find the victims, we’re training ourselves not to see cause and effect,” he said. Wasn’t there, he went on, a “much more interesting .??.??. view of the world in which not everything can be reduced to victim and oppressor?”

Mamet's new book sounds interesting:

Next month a much larger number of liberals and leftists will have the opportunity to be appalled by Mamet’s Stanford speech. Passages from it form the bulk of a chapter in his new book of brief, punchy essays, The Secret Knowledge: On the Dismantling of American Culture. The book marks the terminal point of a years-long conversion from left to right that Mamet-watchers (there are quite a few of these) have long suspected but hadn’t quite confirmed. It’s part conversion memoir, part anthropology, part rant, part steel-trap argument—the testimony of a highly intelligent man who has wrenched himself from one sphere and is now declaring his citizenship in another, very loudly.

Speaking truth to power

Tina Fey, just not that funny:

The soft bigotry of low expectations


I'm sure Tina Fey is funny in person. But not the laugh out loud funny that people strive to credit her for. Should she tell a joke, it's more of a "Hmmm, that's funny" rather than the "Haha" funny. And she did make some success in the male dominated world of comedy writing. But most of that was because she is a funnyish woman. Not in spite of it. Succeeding up the ladder of success the Politically Correct way...


But like any good liberal, nothing is ever her fault. If people don't care for her, it's because of sexism. Not because of the way she polarized 50% of the population....


She spent her tour of duty on SNL making fun of the Right to a canned, liberal audience. And those who weren't liberal were being polite in laughing with the crowd so the tires on their car wouldn't be slashed later

Life imitates art (without the happy ending)

Tragedy of a real-life Weeds mom: Young mother 'brutally murdered and dumped in pond after arriving at house for drug deal'

The tale of the suburban mother sucked into the seedy world of drugs has made millions laugh in the hit Showtime television comedy Weeds.


But the realities of dabbling in drugs brought a nasty ending for Krista Dittmeyer when the 20-year-old mother was brutally murdered in New Hampshire after an alleged drug deal at a house.


Like the Weeds character Nancy Botwin, her apparent respectability masked a grim connection to the violent world of drugs. Police believe she was killed by a gang of men desperate to steal her stash.

News you might have missed

Source: Gibson's ex drops violence claims in court

Funny how the charges were non-stop tabloid fodder, but the dropping of those same charges triggered little notice. Emily Litella lives!

Makes this writer look a lot smarter than the pack of entertainment "journalists" who ran with the story so long (but are now silent).

This stinks to high heaven

FCC commissioner leaves for Comcast

One of the FCC commissioners who approved the Comcast/NBC Universal deal is leaving the commission to work for Comcast.


Meredith Attwell Baker, one of two Republican commissioners on the Federal Communications Commission, announced today that she is leaving her government post when her term expires in June. Baker was appointed to the FCC by President Obama in July 2009.

.

Morning Joe slanders the troops

I don't have very high expectations for MSNBC's morning show. Nonetheless, today they hit a new low even for the home of Lawrence O'Donnell and Chris Matthews.

Morning Joe Regular Accuses US Special Operations In Afghanistan Of 'High-Tech Murder On A Large Scale'

Goldberg asks the right questions

Why the Hurry?

But the real treasure trove is that “college library” of intelligence.


And while reports are pouring out from a gloating White House that’s
leaking like the Titanic in its final hours, one can only assume our analysts have barely begun to exploit the data. Couldn’t they have at least tried to give the CIA a week, a day, even a few more hours to look at it all before letting Ayman al-Zawahiri and the rest of al-Qaeda know about it? Why give him the slightest head start to go even further underground?

Richard Cohen is a morally repulsive idiot

Patterico explains why:

Richard Cohen’s Exceptionally Wrongheaded Essay

An insider explains the "narrative"

I'm a big fan of Stephen Hunter's Bob Lee Swagger novels. Not many writers know how to craft an exciting story while getting the important details right. Like Tom Clancy, Hunter almost always gets it right.


But this is not about Bob the Nailer.


Hunter spent decades working for daily newspapers. He understands how the sausage gets made. As a long-time denizen of the Washington Post, he is a jaundiced observer of how the news business works in the nation's capital. Of late, he has spiced up his fiction with some astute, if withering, commentary on the media.


This is especially timely as the MSM chews over the UBL raid:

For those involved, however, the trials and interviews and think pieces et. al. were really signifiers of nothing. It was just the assholes of the world catching up to what the people on the point of the spear had already done in their name

I don't know that i've seen a better explanation of  "the narrative" and it's role in the news business:

"Let me tell you what's going on, and why this one is so touchy. We are fighting the narrative. You do not fight the narrative. The narrative will destroy you. The narrative is all-powerful. The narrative rules. It rules us, it rules Washington, it rules everything. Now ask me, 'What is the narrative?'


"What is the narrative?"


The narrative is the set of assumptions the press believes in, possibly without even knowing that it believes in them. It's so powerful because it's unconscious. It's not like they get together every morning and decide 'These are the lies we tell today.' No, that would be too crude and honest. Rather, it's a set of casual, nonrigorous assumptions about a reality they've never really experienced that's arranged in such a way as to reinforce their best and most ideal presumptions about themselves and their importance to the system and the way they have chosen to live their lives. It's a way of arranging things a certain way they all believe in without ever really addressing carefully. It permeates their whole culture. They know, for example, that Bush is a moron and Obama a saint. ... And the narrative is the bedrock of their culture, the keystone of their faith, the alter of their church. They don't even know they're true believers, because in theory they despise the true believer in anything. "

UPDATE: 14 October 2016

Key point from Steve Sailer:

The Narrative is controlled in the retelling of the story.

The Times gets it wrong (again)

False narrative about Jessica Lynch and Pentagon surfaces anew

Despite what Timothy Egan wants you to believe, the Pentagon did not fabricate the story about Jessica Lynch's heroism. The Washington Post did that and has never owned up to its mistake. Nor has it clarified why it got the big story so wrong.


Lost in the Lynch story and its evolving devolution is the fact that there was a hero on the road the night of that ambush. His name is Sgt. Donald Walters and you can read his story here.